Understanding Data Accessibility for People with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities

Bongshin Lee Kathleen F. McCoy Edward Cutrell + 6 lainnya

27 April 2021

driven communication by business, government, and science. Furthermore, the use and need for visualizations is not just confined to data experts: Data visualizations are becoming ubiquitous in textbooks, presentations, and reports, as well as in popular media, both online and in print. The design of these visualizations, however, is premised on implicit assumptions about the reader's sensory, cognitive, and motor abilities. People without these abilities are ultimately disenfranchised, and access to the benefits of data visualization and to the underlying information is limited. Data visualizations, such as statistical charts, diagrams, and maps, are an effective means to represent, analyze, and explore data as well as identify and communicate insights. They take advantage of the human visual system’s high bandwidth, parallel processing, and ability to quickly recognize patterns. For instance, a table of numbers may be hard to understand, while those same numbers shown in a graphic form (such as a line chart) will immediately reveal a steadily increasing trend. For these reasons, interactive data visualization is central to both exploratory data analysis and dataD Insights → Lack of accessible access to data visualizations is a significant equity issue. → It's not only visual impairments that can restrict access but also other kinds of disabilities including cognitive and learning disabilities, and motor disabilities. → Overcoming this challenge requires visualization practitioners, visualization and accessibility researchers, and the relevant disability communities to work together.

Kathleen Garrity Shakila Cherise S. Joyner Yea-Seul Kim + 2 lainnya

27 April 2022

Data visualizations are now widely used across many disciplines. However, many of them are not easily accessible for visually impaired people. In this work, we use three-staged mixed methods to understand the current practice of accessible visualization design for visually impaired people. We analyzed 95 visualizations from various venues to inspect how they are made inaccessible. To understand the rationale and context behind the design choices, we also conducted surveys with 144 practitioners in the U.S. and follow-up interviews with ten selected survey participants. Our findings include the difficulties of handling modern complex and interactive visualizations and the lack of accessibility support from visualization tools in addition to personal and organizational factors making it challenging to perform accessible design practices.

Crystal Lee Arvind Satyanarayan Alan Lundgard + 3 lainnya

10 Mei 2022

Current web accessibility guidelines ask visualization designers to support screen readers via basic non‐visual alternatives like textual descriptions and access to raw data tables. But charts do more than summarize data or reproduce tables; they afford interactive data exploration at varying levels of granularity—from fine‐grained datum‐by‐datum reading to skimming and surfacing high‐level trends. In response to the lack of comparable non‐visual affordances, we present a set of rich screen reader experiences for accessible data visualization and exploration. Through an iterative co‐design process, we identify three key design dimensions for expressive screen reader accessibility: structure, or how chart entities should be organized for a screen reader to traverse; navigation, or the structural, spatial, and targeted operations a user might perform to step through the structure; and, description, or the semantic content, composition, and verbosity of the screen reader's narration. We operationalize these dimensions to prototype screen‐reader‐accessible visualizations that cover a diverse range of chart types and combinations of our design dimensions. We evaluate a subset of these prototypes in a mixed‐methods study with 13 blind and visually impaired readers. Our findings demonstrate that these designs help users conceptualize data spatially, selectively attend to data of interest at different levels of granularity, and experience control and agency over their data analysis process. An accessible HTML version of this paper is available at: http://vis.csail.mit.edu/pubs/rich-screen-reader-vis-experiences.

Zack While R. Crouser Ali Sarvghad

19 Maret 2024

Despite the explosive growth of the aging population worldwide, older adults have been largely overlooked by visualization research. This paper is a critical reflection on the underrepresentation of older adults in visualization research. We discuss why investigating visualization at the intersection of aging matters, why older adults may have been omitted from sample populations in visualization research, how aging may affect visualization use, and how this differs from traditional accessibility research. To encourage further discussion and novel scholarship in this area, we introduce GerontoVis, a term which encapsulates research and practice of data visualization design that primarily focuses on older adults. By introducing this new subfield of visualization research, we hope to shine a spotlight on this growing user population and stimulate innovation toward the development of aging‐aware visualization tools. We offer a birds‐eye view of the GerontoVis landscape, explore some of its unique challenges, and identify promising areas for future research.

Petra Isenberg K. Marriott J. Stasko + 3 lainnya

1 Maret 2020

The visualization research community can and should reach broader audiences beyond data-savvy groups of people, because these audiences could also greatly benefit from visual access to data. In this article, we discuss four research topics—personal data visualization, data visualization on mobile devices, inclusive data visualization, and multimodal interaction for data visualization—that, individually and collaboratively, would help us reach broader audiences with data visualization, making data more accessible.